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The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

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Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#2

Post by aquaroris »

I wonder what the post-Moore's law world will look like.

The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information)

As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other promising fields and technologies. I wonder if the next few decades will be dominated with developments from an entirely new discipline and culture.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#3

Post by beloch »

The end of Moore's law will probably come at about the same time true human-like AI appears. i.e. It seems like it will always be just a few decades in the future. e.g. Here's an economist article (sadly, paywalled) predicting that the end was nigh in 1995!

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17272668.html

If you extrapolate current designs out then, yes, a size barrier is approaching. So, we should expect new designs to start appearing. For example, non-planar designs offer a lot of potential to reduce average trace-length, which could reduce power dissipation and increase speeds in turn. There are huge challenges to solve, but it is reasonable to expect that they will be met so long as the demand is there. In this light, Moore's law is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. The demand for computational resources grows exponentially, so a way to meet that demand is always found.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#4

Post by dredmorbius »

aquaroris wrote: post #2

I wonder what the post-Moore's law world will look like. The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information) As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other…

I suspect that though size and speed may not increase, costs will likely continue to fall for at least a while. This will affect what sorts of systems can be computerized and at what cost, if not the computational power of those devices.

And while I've been watching promises of quantum computing for a decade or more with no apparent real progress, it's possible that alternative models of computing devices will allow still greater computational power.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#5

Post by ghshephard »

Whenever I'm wondering if Moore's law is still prevailing as a trailing indicator, I check out: http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/

If that (logarithmic) chart starts to flatten - particularly for device #500 (more price sensitive than the first part of the list) on the list, then we're running into real obstacles.

Let's check back in 2020 and see if Device #500 is running at 10 Petaflops.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#6

Post by jwatte »

aquaroris wrote: post #2

I wonder what the post-Moore's law world will look like. The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information) As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other…

I think you mean decades, not centuries of digitization.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#7

Post by walid »

I don't see this as a major problem since my nearly 4 year old computer is still working fine for most of my computing needs. Computer chips are so powerful now that they don't use a lot more than older computers didn't use.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#8

Post by waps »

aquaroris wrote: post #2

I wonder what the post-Moore's law world will look like. The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information) As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other…

I think it's already plainly visible : since the only way to get more and better performance and features will be large compute farms, the entry-fee for IT related stuff will raise because you need to invest in a horizontally scaled entire data center, instead of just a few computers.

I'd also expect more of EC2 and GCE to happen, and ironically the "small" developer to pay less, but also have less options.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#9

Post by fiatmoney »

ghshephard wrote: post #5

Whenever I'm wondering if Moore's law is still prevailing as a trailing indicator, I check out: http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ If that (logarithmic) chart starts to flatten - particularly for device #500 (more price sensitive than the first part of the list) on the list, then we're running into real obstacles. Let's check back in 2020 and see if Device #500 is running at 10 Petaflops.

Most (all?) of those machines are clusters that scale mostly by throwing in nodes. Even if you have completely static technology, you'll see an exponential trend as long as you're scaling with economic growth by adding nodes.
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